Vinson Cunningham, staff writer for The New Yorker, will discuss Jean Toomer and his unproduced play from 1935, “A Drama of the Southwest.”
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/3nQEZb0
Toomer was, in Cunningham’s description, amodernist poet, novelist, religious omnivore, and occasional playwright .”
James Weldon Johnson, along with his brother, musician J. Rosamond Johnson, and showman Bob Cole, made up one of the most successful songwriting teams of the first decade of the twentieth century. The trio actively worked to elevate Black stage performance away from minstrelsy, the only avenue available for Black performers at the time, by challenging societal expectations at the turn of the century through their popular songs and stage shows.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/2GIZw06
Public historian and curator Wm. Frank Mitchell will discuss the 1955 wedding photos of Carmen De Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder by Saul Mariber from the Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. The photographs (for an example, see: https://bit.ly/3ivQEs4) document the wedding of De Lavallade and Holder at Christ & Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Westport, and their reception at Clarence Derwent House.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/2GEL6OT
Mondays at Beinecke (online) gallery talks continue on Monday, October 12, with a discussion of the scrapbooks of the Rev. Rev. Amos Gerry Beman, a Black minister in New Haven, Connecticut, and a national leader during the mid-nineteenth century. The presentation will be led by Charles Warner, Jr., Chair of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, where the Rev. Beman was pastor from 1837 to 1857.
Zoom webinar registration link: https://bit.ly/2HK9W0l
Mondays at Beinecke returns, virtually! Mondays at 4:00 pm during the academic year, all are cordially invited to gallery talks, online for now, with Beinecke Library staff, researchers, and friends.
Monday, October 5, 4 pm: Beinecke Library Director Edwin C. Schroeder will speak about the Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers. Zoom registration required: https://bit.ly/2Eu6vcG
Mondays at Beinecke returns, virtually! Mondays at 4:00 pm during the academic year, all are cordially invited to gallery talks, online for now, with Beinecke Library staff, researchers, and friends.
Professor Emily Wilson will deliver the 2020 Mark Strand Memorial Reading online on Wednesday, October 7, at 4pm. REGISTER HERE for Zoom webinar: https://bit.ly/3kAuEO1
Celebrated for her vivid and lyrical translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Wilson will read from new work currently in progress: translations of Homer’s Iliad and Oedipus Tyrannos. The reading will be followed by a conversation with Professor Emily Greenwood, Yale Department of Classics.
Samuel R. Delany will deliver the 2020 Windham-Campbell Lecture on September 16. The lecture will be cast at 5 PM EST at windhamcampbell.org.
For several years, the Beinecke Library has marked the Independence Day holiday with a public reading in early July of the United States Declaration of Independence and the oration by Frederick Douglass given on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, in which Douglass asked: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
This year, when public health requires avoidance of such indoor gatherings, the library is offering these readings online. We look forward to resuming this tradition on-site in 2021.
Beinecke Library YouTube channel playlist: https://bit.ly/3dX7lu0
More information: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/declarationDouglass2020
